Martin Luther King, Jr. advised the nation in his famous Washington, DC address that: “I have a dream.” Maya Angelou admonished us of the terrible price to be paid in social terms when that dream is frustrated in her eloquent poem, “A Dream Deferred.” More than 50 years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that segregated public school systems are “inherently unequal.” Subsequent decisions clarified that the inequality exists whether the segregation is de jure [deliberately imposed] or de facto [allowed to occur indirectly or as a result of other external factors].
The Bush Administration has now formally weighed in to battle the use of any form of racial classification in the assignment of children to public schools in cases pending from Louisville and Seattle. The Supreme Court’s ruling that upheld use of race as one factor[among many] in the achievement of a demographically balanced and diverse student body at the University of Michigan Law School is not being directly assailed, but the teeth of the saw blade can clearly be felt upon the tree limb. The Bush Administration argues that past discrimination has been fully remedied and that any racially based criteria are constitutionally forbidden. This same argument was asserted recently in opposition to extension of the Voting Rights Act, despite a recent Supreme Court ruling that a Texas redistricting plan was unconstitutional because it deliberately moved Latino voters out of a district where that group was approaching a majority.
According to the US Solicitor, the school districts whose attempts to achieve or maintain racial diversity are challenged did not advance past discrimination as the basis for their enrollment procedures. Therefore, the Bush Administration has intervened in support of white parents whose children were denied their first choice of school enrollment.
The public has been chastened by the Right Wing from supporting any "social compact" notion that a diverse school environment is more beneficial than a racially and socio-economically segregated school environment for purposes of preparing students to live in the society of today and of the future. Psycholinguistic demonization of terms like “quotas” and “affirmative action” tend to discourage open debate about the impact of ethnicity and class on the education of our children and the hopes of realizing the dreams of which Dr. King and Ms. Angelou passionately spoke.
The very premise of the school enrollment challenges suggests that the effects of past discrimination are not yet fully removed. The contention that their children are entitled to their first choice of schools is derived, at least in part, from a sense of perceived privilege that stems most often from socio economic status. However, there is no constitutional right to attend a “neighborhood” school. The states are required to provide a public education, and most are bound by their state constitutions to provide an "equal educational opportunity" to students. The assignment of students to particular schools is driven by logistics and economic pressures, but is not an equal protection issue. Better schools tended to be built and maintained in areas of the city with higher tax bases from property values. Proprety taxes frequently were the primary basis for schjool funding. Conversely, poorer schools tended to be found in poorer, or lower tax base, neighborhoods. Yet, at least in theory, the state has an equal responsibility to provide the same quality education in each school.
The de facto segregation that historically arose in public schools was driven by factors of perceived entitlement to attend “neighborhood” schools and reliance upon property taxes as the primary funding resource for schools. Neither factor is mandated by the US Constitution. While it would shock the white parents challenging the Louisville and Seattle school district programs, a logical and perfectly legal system could be imposed in which every student in the school district would be assigned to any school, totally randomly and without regard to race or ethnicity. Their children might wind up attending a school down the block or across town, depending upon the lottery results. The white parents living in the million dollar homes would doubtless be dismayed to find their children assigned to a poor inner city school surrounded by homes valued at a far lower value than their own. Yet if the school district is required to assign students entirely without regard to race or ethnicity, and prohibited from using some measures to accommodate neighborhood school concepts without violating the law regarding maintenance of segregated schools, a random process would seem the most logical. The costs of busing and transportation, as well as local political pressures, augur against use of a purely random enrollment process.
The legal issues are thorny, and the intelligence and eloquence of Thurgood Marshall available during the Brown v. Board of Education debate will likely be missing among the lawyers currently presenting arguments, as surely as it is missing from the Supreme Court Bench. Equal protection is a Constitutional protection that must be considered carefully. But the challenge lies in how to provide that protection. If school enrollment decisions are driven by facially neutral factors, such as residential address, which result in a de facto segregated schools, equal protection is denied. If racial classifications are used in a heavy handed manner to construct a racially balanced school population, then equal protection is denied as well. In an ideal world, where the effects of past discrimination would be truly eliminated, every school would provide comparable resources and equal educational opportunity. It would not matter to parents which school their child attended. But the real world is very far from that ideal. The current intervention by the Bush Administration in these cases seeks to further entrench the inequality that does exist and preserve the “privilege” of its constituents who are either in an elevated socio-economic status or are motivated by racism and fear of social integration.
Logic and the beauty of the dreams expressed by Dr. King and Ms. Angelou seem to be cast aside. Census numbers tell us that the Latino population is the fastest growing segment of the US population. Why would I not want my children to attend a school with a complement of Latino, Black, Asian and White students? Would there be a better way to prepare my child to function and compete in society and the business world of tomorrow. Should not all children in this country have the ability to interact and learn in such an environment? How could I believe that “sheltering” my child from exposure to children of other ethnic backgrounds would be better for my child in the long term? But then, as an African American and Native American, I was never brought up to believe that I was “entitled” to my first choice in every matter. And I was never brought up to believe that any child I encountered was “better” than me or “less” than me simply because of skin color. Perhaps if I had been, I would be more sympathetic to the cause of the white parents in Seattle and Louisville. It is even conceivable that I might side with the US Solicitor, but I doubt it.
No comments:
Post a Comment